thundermoose

@thundermoose@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jellyfin is not just good... but *better* than Plex now?!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The Plex app for some versions of Android TV is way too chunky for the resources available. I’ve noticed it performs really badly with smart TVs and it seems to do worse the more background apps you have open, so I’m guessing it’s memory related. It generally seems to work better on dedicated devices like Google TV, although it does still wig out sometimes and need to be restarted.

  My big beef with the Jellyfin app on Android TV is that they don’t include the fast scroll alphabetical bar the web UI has and the title layout is just posters. Everyone I’ve ever had use it complained that it’s just too hard to read. Plus if you have a big library, that leaves you with 2 navigation options: scroll a bunch or type something in with the on screen keyboard. Both of those kind of stink.

  I’ve also run into weird edges with plugins in Android TV. I could never get automatic subtitles to work consistently. The skip intro popup just doesn’t appear sometimes or doesn’t skip correctly when pressed. I suspect there’s some translation error between the Android interface and the plugin interface.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jellyfin is not just good... but *better* than Plex now?!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Intro skipping works pretty well once you set it up and give it time to scan. Functionally, it identifies common audio to determine likely intros, so it can get confused with shows that have different intro music between episodes of the same season.

  Don’t have to change any folder structures unless you were storing optimized media alongside the original files in Plex. All the metadata for both Plex and Jellyfin lives in a SQLite database in your config dir.

  You may wind up transcoding even if you think you really shouldn’t have to. Browsers are weird about supporting some encodings, and both Plex and Jellyfin will automatically transcode to satisfy the client.

  Hardware transcoding is huge, don’t underestimate how impactful it can be. A single 4K CPU transcode could saturate my 72-core server, but one A380 can transcode 3-4 4K streams at the same time. This admittedly doesn’t matter much if you only have one user, but keep it in mind if you ever have to share. It’s so annoying to have a stream start hitching because 1-2 friends decided to start watching something at the same time as you…

  I still don’t have a good replacement for Plexamp either. I think Jellyfin can play music too, but I haven’t tried it myself. I spent a lot of time getting the metadata right in Plex and just haven’t felt like trying to find a way to migrate yet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jellyfin is not just good... but *better* than Plex now?!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You can look at some of my other comments for more specifics, but from your language alone I don’t think you’re being objective here. OP states that Plex is flatly better than Jellyfin, and a bunch of Lemmy users hype it up because of a clear bias for FOSS. A reality check is a good thing, IMO; you can prefer a solution and acknowledge its faults, but people talking on the Internet tend towards extremes instead and that will disillusion anyone who tries Jellyfin expecting all the good parts of Plex but better.

  I prefer FOSS everywhere it’s reasonable, but I think a reality check is healthy here. Jellyfin is full of jank that you may run into because a bunch of independent devs are all doing their own thing to make it. Plex is a for-profit entity pulling in the same direction, so the experience is generally going to be more seamless and supported.

  I run both Plex and Jellyfin simultaneously. I use Jellyfin on my devices, except on Android TV because the app is painful to navigate. Plex is way better for sharing, but I usually offer both. I’ve yet to have anyone prefer Jellyfin, Plex tends to just work on their platforms of choice so they go with it. Unless they’re a technical person, it’s unreasonable to expect them to muddle through the edges of Jellyfin.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jellyfin is not just good... but *better* than Plex now?!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, that part about Plex has always bugged me. You can disable logins for your server with allow-listed networks, but most of the non-desktop apps have to log into the Plex platform to run.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jellyfin is not just good... but *better* than Plex now?!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This isn’t about want, it’s a reality check. OP said jellyfin is better than Plex now, and by objective measure it is not better for most people yet. False expectations hurt Jellyfin adoption, you need to try it with the expectation of jankiness or you’ll just be annoyed by the edges.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jellyfin is not just good... but *better* than Plex now?!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a really strong bias on Lemmy for OSS projects. I’m glad they get so much love here, but everything people say here about Jellyfin has to be taken with a huge grain of salt. It works and you can use it. Depending on your needs, it may even work perfectly for you. There are tons of rough edges though.

  Here’s a few:

  • A bunch of basic functionality most people are used to is missing by default. You can get things like intro detection and subtitle downloading to work with plugins, but you have to work at it.
  • Hardware acceleration still kind of sucks. You can get it to work, but the Jellyfin port of ffmpeg doesn’t work anywhere near as well as Plex’s.
  • The variety in app experience is bewildering sometimes. Apps look and feel very different between platforms.
  • Android TV app support sucks. The app is difficult to navigate and has a bunch of weird edges, like subtitle defaults not working. I have no idea what OP is talking about here, it sounds like they’re only judging the app on its animation speed.
  • Public network support is finicky. This is hard to quantify, but I’ve been on several remote networks where my Jellyfin connection dropped in and out and Plex did not. I suspect this is due to the Plex Relay service making up for bad routes between my house and the network.

  Jellyfin is improving all the time, and I hope the recent EFCore update improves performance and development velocity. I’m also holding out hope it will eventually lead to externally hosted databases and active-active servers.

  Disclaimer: I run Plex and Jellyfin and regularly check in on the state of things in Jellyfin. I donate to Jellyfin. I want Jellyfin to be better than Plex. I don’t think any objective measure bears this out yet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ZFS new disk⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, forgot to mention: striping in ZFS will use the capacity of the smallest drive. It sounds like you have a 1TB drive and a 4TB drive, so striping would give you access to 2TB at most.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ZFS new disk⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Losing one drive in a striped pool with no redundancy means the entire pool is shot. Restoration from your HDDs may take a very long time, on top of data loss between the time of failure and your last snapshot. Striping without redundancy is fast, but dangerous.

  This may work at first, and maybe you really do have a use case where this kind of failure is tolerable. However, in my experience, data is precious more often than it isn’t. Over time, you’re more likely to find use cases where the loss of the pool will be frustrating at best, and devastating at worst.

  If you’re not using any redundancy, I would create separate pools so each drive can fail independently. You’ll have all 5TB of storage, but not contiguously. That at least constrains the failure modes you’re likely to run into.

  If you are striping with redundancy (e.g., RAID-Z1), which I would highly recommend, you can lose a drive and not lose any data. That would take at least 3 equally-sized drives though, and you’d only be able to use the capacity of 2 of them.